Formal environmental education in the Cerrado de Corrente - Piauí: possible approaches in the geography of elementary school

Abstract

The world has undergone intense transformations in its landscape, such as the creation of new cities and the opening of agricultural fields, due to the expansion of the human being on planet Earth. As a consequence of the advance of the human being on the planet, environmental problems arise as a result of unrestrained exploitation, disrespecting the resilience of nature, thus, the biomes around the world are affected by this process of modification and the Cerrado, the second largest biome on the planet, is inserted in this segment. In order to mitigate such problems, Environmental Education activities become essential and it emerges as a tool capable of transforming the vision that human beings have of the environment. The present work investigates the natural potentialities of the municipality of Corrente-PI in the area of the Morros do Pico, which are located in the Cerrado of Piauiense. As a basis for analysis and as a presentation of the methodology, maps were generated through geoprocessing, enabling the location of the Morros do Pico in the Piauiense space. The study aims to evaluate the didactic potentiality of the Morro do Pico as a support to the teaching of Environmental Education in Geography in the Cerrado biome, in Primary Education. For this, a portfolio was produced as didactic material to support teachers in which the local Cerrado is used as a context for the teaching/learning of Geography contents. The portfolio was developed after consulting the BNCC, to identify at which grade level the Cerrado theme would be worked in Geography. Through the application of a didactic sequence in which the portfolio served as a common thread, the participants, elementary school students, answered a questionnaire in order to assess the effectiveness of the tool. The results of these questionnaires were submitted to statistics. A deviance analysis was done to evaluate differences between the groups, using the chi-square statistic at 5% significance level. The odds ratio was also calculated and tested, and it was possible to verify that students who participated in the portfolio activity had a 2.64 higher chance of getting the correct answer when compared to a group that did not have the same experience. Environmental Education activities through the local natural heritage are essential for the population to develop a sense of environmental belonging.